William Wordsworth was the supreme bard of nature and solitude

https://www.economist.com/prospero/2020/04/06/william-wordsworth-was-the-supreme-bard-of-nature-and-solitude ^ | 4/6/2020

[Borges]

Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, he remains a poet “of blessed consolations in distress”

IN THIS SEASON of cancelled parties, the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth’s birth will also go unmarked in public. Celebrations of the English poet, born on April 7th 1770, should have bloomed like his beloved daffodils all over the Lakeland region (pictured), and beyond. He taught not only his compatriots but devotees around the world to be, like him, “a lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains; and of all that we behold / From this green earth”. Now the British landscapes he trudged through are empty of the visitors that his verse attracted from overcrowded Victorian cities. (Indeed, in his later years Wordsworth fretted about the mass tourism that his Romantic worship of unspoilt nature had fostered. “Is then no nook of English ground secure / From rash assault?” he thundered when the Kendal and Windermere railway, designed to carry Wordsworthian excursionists, was proposed in 1844.)

Wordsworth has lately stridden back into fashion as a pioneer ecologist, a “green” visionary. For him, nature is a single, interconnected system. Every child joins it not as an alien manipulator but, as his autobiographical epic, “The Prelude”, puts it, “an inmate of this active universe”; even “as an agent of the one great mind”. The fledgling poet, his mature self recalled, grasped and gloried in the interdependence of nature, “for in all things / I saw one life, and felt that it was joy.” The so-called “Gaia hypothesis” of modern environmentalism starts here.

[Robert DeLong]

Lakeland region

A man I had never heard of before, but respect his eye for beauty. Thanks for sharing. 8>)

[Jamestown1630]

I’m not sure of what you are trying to get at, here.

Many people throughout history have had the spiritual experience of recognizing that they were essentially unified with and inseparable from the entire natural Universe.

I don’t think that many of them intended that people should ‘worship’ Nature, as if it were a God – but that the beauty and integrity of Nature should suggest to us that there IS a God; and that ‘the Lord, Our God, is One.’

I was privileged to enjoy a short correspondence with a gentleman who died soon after I made his acquaintance. Here is what he wrote about his own experience:

"One forenoon late in September of 1960 while I was walking east on Post Street in busy downtown San Francisco, I entertained the most extraordinary experience in my spiritual development.

"Quite suddenly I became aware that I was not my body, although I most assuredly was its life. To my illumined sense, my being was totally invisible, although I was far more real than I had ever felt myself to be up to that moment. Not only was I invisible and real, but that invisible reality was the actual substance of all that I beheld, and I was beholding the same objects that had become familiar to me from living in that exciting city.

"To my apprehension, I was the Bay Bridge; I was the Bohemian Club; I was the pebble I sensed so keenly under my foot; I was the traffic signal at the corner; I was even the newspaper vendor.

"Everything I was seeing was just as I had always seen it, except that in this experience no object or person even seemed to have existence independently of my perception of its being. To my invisible reality, the perception and I, the perceiver, were one and the same substance."

Many people - of all religions, and throughout human history - have experienced this; it is spiritual, not intellectual, in nature.

I think it’s a big mistake to try and torture those experiences into conflation with temporal political ideologies; and I hope that you are not attempting to do so, here.

These are entirely separate 'things'.

[Borges]

I didn’t write this.

[Jamestown1630]

Did you post it because you agreed with it, or because you disagreed with it? My objections were to the content and assumptions contained in what you actually posted.

At any rate: there is no evidence that Wordsworth ever rejected his traditional religion; on the contrary, he appears to have remained deeply loyal to his Church. There was no conflict between his personal mystical experience and belief, and his devotion to his traditional religion. Appreciation and understanding are not 'worship' in the sense that one worships an ultimate and singular God - Wordsworth's understanding seems to reference the quality of Immanence.

(And most of the New Age 'Gaia' worshipers probably couldn't read and understand him in the first place.)

Depending on why you posted it, you might be interested in the following old books:

'Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind', by Richard Maurice Bucke

'The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature', by William James

[Borges]

I posted it because it’s the only thing I could find on Wordsworth’s 250.

[Jamestown1630]

My apologies, then. I thought you were attempting to communicate the content of the bit you posted.